A brief reflection on ReactEurope 2016

1. GraphQL all the things

There seems to be a big push for the use of GraphQL, now it’s a little more mature and developers have been releasing language implementations it’s gaining some popularity. I think it’s important to remember that GraphQL is only relevant if you’re dealing with data structures that have graph-like many to many relationships. There was a question during the last Q&A, someone asked something like, “How do I deal with deleting data in GraphQL” (if I remember correctly it was Lee Byron) the panel replied “don’t ever delete anything”. To me this make sense as deletes could potentially start to break those many to many relationships causing nulls to be thrown.

Edit: Thanks Ash for clarifying in the comments — I misinterpreted both the question and the answer. The question was about changing the schema of the data and the answer was tread carefully and keep schema changes to a minimum.

Again, if you’re not dealing with many to many — you don’t need GraphQL.

2. Guys, React Native is totally ready, get on that shit!

Bonnie Eisenman’s run down of React Native was a really great opportunity to see how quickly it’s come from a single platform, unstable, barely documented experiment to a well supported, multi-platform contender in the native space. She highlighted the recent announcement of Windows & Samsung platform support and the drive to get React Native on to more platforms, not just phone/tablet devices.

For me this is the area that excites me the most, if harks back to aspirations of Adobe Air and that panacea of learn once, write for anywhere. It seems like React Native has a really strong chance of being one of the platforms that reaches that goal. Adobe’s solution always felt like it was doing something it shouldn’t, but now at least with React Native platforms see the advantages to opening up and allowing alternatives to true native development.

3. People are making some awesome things with React

These include in no particular order:

i) Phil Holden’s subdivide, a library for doing split pane layouts in React, very useful for debugging, he has a great screencast showing it off

ii) Max and Nik’s Carte Blanche, which gives developers an environment to test their components with lots of different props

iii) Krzysztof’s Animated.js for creating declarative animations in React and React Native

I’m sure there’s plenty that I’ve missed as my notes are a little sparse, I highly recommend subscribing to ReactEurope’s YouTube channel as I expect them to be posting videos of all the sessions soon. I for sure will be going and re-watching my favourites.

A quick hat tip to RedBadger who not only arrange and sponsored React Europe, but also London’s React meetup they announced they’re starting a London’s first React conference next year. Head on over to React.London to signup for updates.